5 Tasks You Should Not Be Doing As A CEO

When your day fills up with small yet necessary administrative chores, the important work tends to get pushed aside. Outsourcing to a team handling your diary management, refining your meeting notes, collecting your invoices, organising your inbox, and preparing your slide decks frees you to focus on the work only you can do by using your expert knowledge.

As CEO of your own company, it can be easy to take on every role within that business in the early days. You’ve spent so much time building this business that it can be hard to let go and trust somebody to help you. Yet the more of the operational load that you take on, the less time and energy you have to spend doing the client work that carries your business forward.

You find yourself worrying about making sales and bringing in new clients, yet you spend the first ninety minutes of every morning filtering through routine emails, chasing stray receipts, and rescheduling missed calls instead of following up on warm leads.

Here are five operational tasks that you should be delegating to a trusted partner:

Diary Management

Constant back and forths over email to find a time for a Microsoft Teams meeting or a Google Meet not only take up your valuable time, but also mental bandwidth. Handing meeting coordination to an operational support team means that they will liaise with the other parties and organise the meetings for you. Better yet, if the team has access to your inbox, they can pick up the meeting requests straight away without you having to hand over a list!

Note Taking/Meeting Minutes

Automated transcription tools like Otter.ai, Fathom, or Microsoft Copilot are fantastic for capturing conversations, but raw AI notes still need human oversight. AI summaries produce vague next steps and misunderstand who is accountable for what. The operations team can look over these notes to check they’re correct and that everyone knows what their action points are reduces the likelihood of errors moving forward. 

Chasing & Locating Invoices

An operations team can create an automation to follow up any unpaid invoices, or can reach out to them directly when the deadline has passed. There is also the task of locating invoices for your bookkeeper, one of those tasks that just takes so much time out of your day. Each month your bookkeeper needs your invoices for your monthly subscriptions, your amazon orders, your coffee receipts. Outsourcing this task means there will be a system of finding the invoices, auto-forwards will be set up where possible and liaisons directly with your bookkeeper are kept outside of your main inbox, keeping your financial records tidy without requiring your personal involvement.

Managing & Filtering Inbox

Opening your email to 50 unread messages creates instant decision fatigue before your workday has even started. Do you have promotional emails that you instantly delete and never read, but don't have time to unsubscribe? You can delegate this. Your emails can be filtered every morning, with anything that needs actioning being brought to your attention, any meeting requests already scheduled for you and an empty inbox before you even open it. 

Formatting Presentations & Slide Decks

Formatting slides in Canva, PowerPoint, or Google Slides is time-consuming and often frustrating. If you've written the content to go in these presentations, there's no harm in delegating the formatting to someone else so that you can focus on your client work. The team can take the content and distribute it throughout the slide template, and if you don't have templates set up, this can be done for you as well.

Now of course, if you enjoy these tasks and want to do them yourself - no one is actually telling you what you can and can't do! But if you find yourself procrastinating these tasks, or spending way too much time on them and having no time to bring in new clients and complete projects, then maybe delegation is not such a bad idea.

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